Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his answer. Unfortunately, it is not what we see happening in reality in my home area.

The second obvious issue I want to address is response times. The ambulance services are under pressure to meet a 90-second turnaround from when the call comes in to getting an ambulance on the road. It appears little thought has been put into where that ambulance is coming from. Surely, we must look to see how long an ambulance takes to arrive at a call, not how quickly it can be put on the road. The situation we have means an ambulance such as the one in Thurles is being directed to drive around the country all day without actually making it to calls, all the while leaving a large area without a service that it desperately needs. I am asking for additional resources in order that our emergency services and paramedics are not spending their shifts driving from call to call and being redirected without even reaching the person in need, time and time again. Our region, the south east, needs additional resources in order that Thurles, which is in the mid-west region, is not drained of its paramedics and ambulances to fill the gap.

I read out the timetable. It is nonsensical to think that an ambulance in Thurles would do such driving around the country. We must take a serious look at the National Ambulance Service nationwide. Measuring response times in terms of how long it takes to put an ambulance on the road is not correct. It should be measured by how long it takes to get to the call and the person in question.

I was talking to one of the paramedics who told me they were being redirected to a call in Kilkenny after being redirected from Borris-in-Ossory. He said they were passing by Borris-in-Ossory and contacted the central location to find out whether to do the call in Borris-in-Ossory on the way because the patient would be going to Kilkenny. He was told not to because there was an ambulance on the way from Ballinasloe to deal with the call. This type of inefficiency cannot be allowed to continue. It is happening at the moment and the paramedics are getting frustrated with the use of their resources.

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